CipherBlog

2007-01-07T20:11:00.000-05:00

WANTING TO RUN

I didn't start this blog to piss people off, but somehow or other I've managed to alienate a few people at various times because of things I've said, or not said, in my posts.

After my entry yesterday, David wrote to me & said that regardless of my changed tastes, saying that I read what he's written & want to run is a shitty thing to say to a friend.

I'm not sure why that's the case, but even so, I recognize that I didn't explain myself--my wanting to run--very well. I certainly didn't mean for it to bring anything to bear on our friendship, and neither did I mean for it to have anything to do with David either as a writer or as a person.

Instead, I think it comes down to my own insecurities & discomforts about my changing--not changed--ideas about poetry, along with my insecurities and discomforts about the fact that I haven't been writing for the past four years.

I came back to the US from Paris and admitted that I was bored with the poetry I’d been writing. I hadn’t been putting much energy into it, and so I thought I’d take a break for a month. That month has lasted for four years, with only a handful of scraps to the contrary (I began this blog half a year ago with a promise to write every day, a promise I have definitively not kept). I’m certainly not comfortable with this fact, and what I think back on is not my boredom with my writing, but my realization the year after graduation from college that I could write a certain kind of poem very easily and very well, but that I wanted to push myself further. And yet in the next three years, I failed to. Failed to even try. So no wonder I got bored with what I was writing, to say nothing of bored with what I was reading (or more appropriately, bored with what I wasn’t reading).

Add to all that all the questions about what academics and institutionalization adds to poetry, and where I am, and about all the clichés and truisms about academics and translators as poètes manqués, and the source of my insecurities comes out. If that isn’t enough, I also have to worry about the kind of poetry I research & write about: is it edgy enough? is it radical enough? is it engaged enough? As if engaged or radical or edgy meant anything in medieval China! And yet, here I am wondering if my own presentation of self as poet and translator and academic and reader all adds up.

Why exactly does this make me want to run from David's poetry? Well, I should probably say first that it doesn’t, completely. I've read four of David's recent poems: two I liked, and two I didn’t. But what I did want to run from, especially in the latter two, was the comfort, the ease that I found there. I’m obviously a pretty anxious and agitated person—features of myself that produce more agitation and anxiety—and I seem to be wanting agitated and anxious poetry. And at the same time, the intimacy, the sincerity, the seductiveness of David's writing is also something I think writing should be. And so there is an anxiety in there after all (a tension, we could call it, that is in the end unresolved), and at the same time I look into that anxiety and that tension and see calmness and comfort, and I know that that isn’t what I want my poetry to be. But insofar as my poetry isn’t anything, what can I do? I could face all this, or I could say I want to run.

So in the end, I'm afraid of David's poetry. I'm afraid of the poetry of any friend of mine whose writing is both better than I could do and yet not what I want poetry to be. I'm not sure if that's a shitty thing to say to a friend; I do think it's a shitty way to be as a person. But in the end, the truth of it says a lot about me and very little about anyone or anything else.

2007-01-06T15:41:00.000-05:00

THE NEW YEAR

We've just returned to New Haven from three weeks of family time in northern California & Chicago. Some new books, too, that I'm looking through or about to, by W. Somerset Maugham, Tony Fitzpatrick, Robert Creeley, & others.

We also had lunch with my college friends, Jen (née Heinlein) & David Keeling, who have been living in Chicago for the past few years. After a MSW from the University of, Jen staid in Chicago to do social work and fight the good fight, while David has been the midwest office for an organization setup to accredit career-switchers into public school systems, such as the Chicago Public Schools, also fighting the good fight. And as of January 2nd, David has reduced his work-week to a supereuropean thirty hours so he can spend his mornings writing. He's chronicling some of his experiences & more of his thoughts on his blog, A Writing Year, which I'm including to my list of links, to the right.

David was one of the best writers I knew at college, and while his practice has probably decreased--compelling him towards his MFA-of-one in the mornings of '07--from what I've seen of his writing, his talent has not. And yet, for reasons of my own, I was much more willing to respond to David's writing seven years ago than I am today. Simply, my tastes have changed, have been pushed beyond where I could even conceive of them being while I was at Middlebury. For instance, I would have considered myself & my reading habits to be some variation of modernist, postmodernist, and / or avant-garde while in college, but at the time I only had access (that is, mental access) to Ezra Pound as the avatar of that kind of writing. After graduation, I came across (from the essays of Eliot Weinberger, primarily) names like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and so on (to say nothing of Rachel Blau du Plessis, Clayton Eshleman, and Jerome Rothenberg, to say nothing of the non-Americans), and all of a sudden my own stable standing as an avant-gardiste who knew little beyond Pound & Williams seemed pretty feeble. So now when I come back to David's poetry, which is a fine example of School of Quietude craft and focus, I sense a distance that I didn't sense before. In college, David & I would let each other read our poems and I might feel envious; today, I read what he's written, and I want to run.

I wonder what he would think about that. I'll have to ask him.

2006-12-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

UPDATES

I have a few publications to boast about.

First, the current issue of Twentieth Century Literature includes my review of Eric Hayot's Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. I think this might be my first official academic publication, at least judged chronologically from the time of printing.

Another review of mine was printed on the Zoland Poetry site, a review of two versions of the Laozi 老子, Thomas Meyer's translation titled daode jing, and David B. Axelrod's poetic re-configuration, Another Way: Poems derived fromthe Tao Te Ching. Both of these reviews give a bit of autobiographical detail from when my interest in learning Chinese first developed.

The most recent publication is in the new Rain Taxi, of Keith Waldrop's The Flowers of Evil, a verset translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. My favorite thing about review is the serendipity about the fact that in the review I wrote for the previous Rain Taxi, of Jacques Roubaud's The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart, translated by Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop, I wrote “Roubaud can lead to Baudelaire, for instance, just as Baudelaire leads to Roubaud.” And the next review I write is of a Waldrop translation of Baudelaire. If I were in a Pynchon novel, I’d come across Waldrop's translation of “the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart” in Flowers of Evil and think it was more than a coincidence.

Also in the new issue of Rain Taxi is an interview with Steve Bradbury done by Shin Yu Pai. They even mention CipherJournal, and me by name! Steve was the one who introduced the Taipei Poetry Festival to me, giving me a chance for extra pay and more translation publications. The translations were published in the festival volume, Images of the World, Songs from the Soul: Selections from the Taipei International Poetry Festival, edited by Hung Hung 鴻鴻.

I'm also adding two new blogs to my links list, to the right. The first is an academic blog I enjoy, Culture Industry (or Kulturindustrie). The second is one I think will turn out to be very important, the International Exchange for Poetic Invention.

2006-11-28T11:16:00.000-05:00

CLICHED IN TRANSLATION

I came across a review in the LA Times of Robert Fagles's new translation of The Aeneid, linked from Ron Silliman's blog. I've written before about clichés in translation, but perhaps a larger problem--at least insofar as increasing the readership of translations in general is concerned--is the use of clichés in book reviews of translations. Consider this, how Thomas Cahill opens his review:

Now here's an unrewarding subject: translation. The Italians have it right when they insist "traduttore traditore," for every translator is, of necessity, a traitor to the original text. Robert Frost hit the nail on the head: When asked what poetry is, he said it's what's lost in translation.

Cahill, the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, has strung up three clichés in a row. As always, the problem with clichés is not their veracity--each of these sentences presents an undeniable, and undeniably boring, truth--but rather their lame attitude towards truth. Rather than digging further into what makes these phrases true--or more interestingly, what makes them false--the author of a cliché asserts the most mundane and limited fact imaginable, all the while thinking that he's really clever for his observations and his phrasing.

I don't expect that a book reviewer would have read scholarship on literary theory or translation studies. I don't think that only someone familiar with, say, Lawrence Venuti's books can write an effective review of literature in translation. But when the highest praise that Cahill can give to Fagles is, "This work, this miraculous beast of a text, is so enjoyable that you will hardly know you are reading an ancient masterpiece," he's coming very close to the kind of ethic that Venuti argues against in The Translator's Invisibility: if we forget that we are reading an ancient masterpiece, if we forget that we are reading a translation, then we are pretending that all the world throughout time acts and thinks and feels and speaks the way that we do now. And if that's the case, then what do we need translation for, anyway?

Sure, I understand that Cahill means only to praise Fagles for producing a translation that is lively rather than staid, relevant rather than dusty, and these are all qualities I look for in literature--especially translation--too. But by relying on so many clichés, Cahill's own writing is staid and dusty. By praising Fagles's translation by saying it seems like something it is not, then anyone who reads the Aeneid after reading Cahill's review is reading it in spite, not because, it is a translation. Is this how the publishing world plans to introduce more translations and push past the myopia of the American book consumer?

I have no idea if Fagles's Aeneid is any good (with my tastes, I have a hard time imagining anybody's Aeneid is any good). Based on what Cahill and other reviewers have written, it appears to contain passages of great strength. But if that strength is not also matched by strong reviewers and strong readers, then we have the impotence of someone who fled the Trojan war and languished at sea, never reaching another peninsula to found another empire, let alone descend into the underworld to emerge through the Gates of Horn.

2006-11-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

TRANSLATIONS ON THE PICKET LINE

Last week we went to a rally to protest working conditions at a laundry facility nearby. Our chants went back and forth between English and Spanish, further testament to how much I need to learn that language. A write-up in the paper described the bilingual chanting like this:

Chanting catchphrases like "No contract, no peace" and "The people united will never be conquered" alternately in Spanish and English, 110 protesters - including a trio of New England Linen Supply workers - marched up and down Derby Avenue.

As should be obvious to anyone who's ever witnessed a left-wing rally, the phrase in English would be "The People / United / Will never be defeated." It rhymes--or comes close to rhyming--better that way, though in Spanish the exact linguistic equivalents are going to have to be fudged for the purposes of chantability. Of course, the unwitting writer of the above-quoted article has stumbled onto an interesting question of translation theory: what is the relationship between absolute accuracy and pre-established conventions, in this case the convention of chanting?

As I wrote in a comment to the What in the Hell blog recently, Spanish is a much more chantable language than English. My favorite chant at the rally went like this:

New England Linen / Escucha / Estamos en la lucha

The first three words were pronounced with a Spanish accent, so before I asked my Bolivian-American union organizer friend what we were saying, I had to keep my mouth shut ("estamos en la lucha" I could figure out from what French I know, and eventually I picked up on "escucha," but I couldn't guess at what sounded like nu inlanli nen might mean). Here, of course, we have a different example of translation theory in praxis: how do foreign words get nativized so as to match conventions, in this case the convention of pronunciation?

In fact, "The people united will never be conquered" and "New England Linen" represent opposite ends of the same continuum. The strange is made familiar, while the familiar is made strange. And if the management of New England Linen could listen to the voices of its employees and offer liveable wages and benefits, then perhaps what is strange and what is all too familiar could be left behind.

2006-11-14T12:01:00.000-05:00

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

Someone pointed out that, in my write-up of Venepoetics, where I mentioned my enthusiasm for Spanish poetry & translators from Spanish, I missed Clayton Eshleman. Particularly egregious because of his Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, newly out from University of California Press, I was set to wondering why I might have overlooked Clayton when coming up with my list.

The easy answer is that it was a sin of omission, rather than commission: I didn't exclude him, I just left him out. I was writing quickly, I think, and picked a few of my favorites. But certainly Clayton should have been close to the front of my mind: I've published a number of pieces of his--both prose and poetry--on CipherJournal, and we've long been in corespondence.

But as a translator of Spanish, while Clayton is certainly a master, and no one has done as much to fill the Vallejo gap in English, for some reason he doesn't register in my mind. This is odd, because the first Eshleman book translation I read was Tricle, but for a number of reasons, I think I see Clayton more as a translator of French than of Spanish, as a writer more associated with French rather than Spanish culture. This is emphatically not to downplay the significance or quality of his Spanish translations, but rather to up-play the significance of French culture to Clayton, and also to raise a question about national definitions and connotations.

The first book of Clayton's that I read was From Scratch, but I didn't then have the New American wherewithal to understand his post-projectivist poetics. After returning from France, where I learned about the lasting importance of Surrealism and its later developments, and where I had also tried my hand at translating a few of Aimé Césaire's poems, I bought Clayton's big book of Césaire's poetry, and set to reading it. I had that book in my bag, coincidentally, when I met Clayton for the frist time.

But is that enough for me to associate Clayton with French, or with France? (what would Césaire think about such a prospect?) Is Surrealism a French phenomenon, or is it a universal phenomenon with French characteristics? Or, especially in its Négritude moments, is it an anti-French phenomenon, with French hearing being read as controlled, rational, and refined? I'm not sure that I can answer these questions, except to say that from Baudelaire to Derrida so much of French literature seems to be aimed at dismantling the limits of the French identity; that these have since become the hallmarks of that very French identity seems to me to be a very large irony indeed.

In addition, or perhaps supporting, Clayton's Surrealism is Clayton's investment and investigation in cave paintings, most of which are physically locating in France. That the physical location isn't as important as the psychic location in Clayton's poetry is obvious, nonetheless, even if it's nothing more than that I know Clayton and Caryl lead cave tours in southern France, I think this may also contribute to my linking of Clayton to French culture.

And yet, how far can this go, really? Not only is Surrealism beyond mainstream French culture, so is Upper Paleolithic cave art, only accidentally within the borders of what we now call France. Or, to look at it the other way, if we expand the parameters of what can be meant by "French," then perhaps all Latin-American poetry since Breton went to Mexico is French, too. Césaire is French and Paz is French and Cortázar is French and Vallejo is certainly French. But if French culture extends this far, is it reduced to nothingness?

All that matters, in the end, is Clayton's poetry:

Now that you are showering, cables of water convert, ghost-loaded suds, Rabelais's mane furls from Aphrodite's thigh...

2006-10-06T16:02:00.000-04:00

THE TECHNOLOGY OF WRITING

When Nathaniel Mackey came, he talked about the relationship between how he writes and how he reads aloud. He pointed to a passage in Paracritical Hinge, in the chapter called "Sight-Specific, Sound Specific...":

This is the poem performing on the stage the page amounts to (and on the stage the reader's mind amounts to by way of the page). I don't, however, feel obligated to read the poem aloud in the manner such placement might suggest--obligated or even able. What, after all, do varied margins sound like? (What, for that matter, does an unvaried margin sound like?) To avail oneself of graphic amenities peculiar to the page is not to disallow the poem behaving differently when read aloud but to recognize that it does. The ultimate untransmissibility of vocal dynamics timbre, accent, pace, volume, inflection, and so forth) by print--and vice versa--makes variance inevitable. The poem's articulation is as various as its locations.

From there, he went on to how writing the way he writes has gotten more difficult over time. That sentence is not meant in a metaphyisical way, but in a material way: with an electric typewriter, he could drop a word to the next line and hang an indent at the push of a literal button. Now he has to use tabs and spaces and eyeball it to get the same effect. A step forward for technology, but backward for the technology of experimental poetry.

We may be used to thinking about the effect of technological and material developments on poetry. We may understand how the declining price of paper allowed for formal poetic practices now considered second-nature, such as line-breaks. When Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 prefaces a batch of twenty poems with "紙墨遂多。辭無詮次。聊命故人書之。以為歡笑爾。 The paper and ink have multiplied, words without order or sequence. I've asked for an old friend to rewrite them, so we can laugh and delight in them," we might remember how much a hermit in fifth century China must have paid for such pleasure.

But we may not be used to thinking about how technology affects our own writing habits. Now that paper is so cheap and available that we don't even need to use it for poetry, we face other constrictions in word-processors and html. I told Mackey that when I typed up his poem in my last post on this blog, I couldn't get the right justification based on spaces alone. Instead, I had to fill in the spaces with periods, and then color them the same as the background. In other words, I had to write this:

.....................................Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
.....................................................breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
...........................................bells
had we been................................
rung ......................................................

so I wouldn't have this:

Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
bells
had we been
rung

If technology is debilitating, rather than facilitating, advancements in poetry, it may be because the owners of technological advancement are not interested in poetry, let alone poetic advancement. We could, of course, compose our poems in programs like Quark rather than Word, laying-out our writing more than typing, or even writing (though perhaps better than processing). The page/stage freedom there, of course, comes with a certain technical savoir-faire (or, as my dad sez, subway fare), which is not exactly the kind of democratizing trend that we imagine both technology and poetry to have prepared us for. And if the owners of technological advancement are de-democratizing poetry, then what will happen (and what has happened) to the other areas of cultural production under the ownership of similar technocrats and businesspeople?

2006-09-24T11:45:00.000-04:00

ZEN & THE ART OF ALLUSION

We were talking about references and allusions in poetry, how poetry today is uncomfortable with its earlier role of the similarly-educated speaking in a private language to the similarly-educated, and how allusions have sometimes been stripped, but have more often been democratized, diversified, and unhitched from a one-to-one correspondence of knowledge leading to understanding.

The poem in question was from Nathaniel Mackey's Splay Anthem, "Glenn on Monk's Mountain: 'mu' twenty-fourth part." In his introduction Mackey explains some of his background, something of ringing:

Emblematic of an outside seriality wishes to reach, ringing is sonic resurfacing, a step up as well as out. It invites echo, reverberation, overtone, undertone, resonance and repetition. In seriality, rasp is recursive form, a net of echoes; it catches. One hears this in the music of Glenn Spearman, a San Francisco Bay Area tenor saxophonist to whom four of the poems herein, published in 2002 as a chapbook entitled Four for Glenn, are dedicated, poems in which rung is bouth noun and verb, in which climb, we're reminded, rhymes with chime. (xii)

And with that hint we're supposed to know that Glenn is Glenn Spearman, and Monk is Thelonious Monk, but just as rung can be both noun and verb, these allusions can point beyond the field of Mackey's likely knowledge. Monk can be monk, and at the end of the poem we have a kind of transcendence in a union of opposites:

Pads and keys cried out for

climb, clamor, something yet

................................................to arrive

we called rung. Rickety wood, split

reed, sprung ladder. More splinters

the more steps we took... Rung

was a bough made of air, an

unlikely plank suddenly under our

..........................................................feet we

floated up from, rung was a loquat

limb, runaway ladder, bent miraculous

branch, thetic step... Flesh beginning

to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,

.....................................................breath

an abiding chime, chimeless,

...........................................bells

had we been................................

rung ......................................................

In the eighth century, Wang Wei 王維, one of the most prized poets of his day and after, wrote a poem about his search for a temple amidst the misty mountains:

過香積寺 Passing Fragrance Gathering Temple

不知香積寺 Where is. . . . Fragrance Gathering Temple?
數里入雲峰 How many miles . . . .into the cloudy peaks?

古木無人徑 Ancient trees . . . .with no path for men
深山何處鐘 Deep in the mountains . . . .and where is that bell?

泉聲咽危石 The sound of the spring. . . coughs on the slippery stones
日色冷青松 The color of the sun . . . .cold on the green pines

薄暮空潭曲 In thin dusk. . . . by the curve of the empty pool
安禪制毒龍 I meditate . . . .and curb the poison dragons

I have no reason to believe that Nathaniel Mackey has ever read this poem, let alone internalized it enough to recreate it through something as different in shape and referent as "Glenn on Monk's Mountain." But somehow, with knowledge of Wang Wei's poem, Mackey's allusions begin to shift, and the Monk, the Mountain, its "crosslegged, lotusheaded," its bells, its chimes, its rung ringing, down to "Flesh beginning / to go like wax, we sat like Buddha," are not so much jazz as a curbing of poison dragons, the desires of the flesh that jazz might otherwise indulge.

And this is the democratization, the diversification of references. 條條大路通羅馬 All roads lead to Rome, as they say in Chinese, and in poetry today we no longer need to know (if we ever did) exactly what each referent means to decipher the code; rather, the play of referents is its own composition by field, its own game wherein yours and mine, jazz and medieval Chinese Buddhism, melt into one.

2006-09-17T13:00:00.000-04:00

NEW LINKS

I saw an advertisement for an online search engine that implored me not to keep using one site for all my searches just out of habit. Interested in trying something new and sucker for advertising that I am, I trotted over to ask.com and did a search for myself, or at least CipherJournal. I didn't find the results quantifiably different from what I'm used to at Google (though I'm not so impressed by Google's censorship "in accordance with local laws" in places like China, and perhaps Ask can assuage my guilt...), but I did come across three blogs with links to my journal, and I've added them to the links list to the right.

What in the hell... is perhaps the best title for a blog that I've come across, as well as being the hyper-intellectualized postings of a rabid leftist. So far as I know, I've never been in contact with the blogger (his--or, less likely, her--name is absent from the pages), but in a list of links broken into sub-categories like The Weight of Dead Tradition, Sound Proletarian Science, and Dictatorship of the Conversariat, I found CipherJournal listed under the heading L'Internationale. A fine place to be, I think.

It's All Connected... is the blog of my friend Richard Jeffrey Newman, one of the few writers and translators I've published on CipherJournal that I've actually met in person. I had read It's All Connected for a spell when he first announced it, but it's been a pleasure to come back after an absence.

Embroiled in China as I am and recently having begun studying Sanskrit, I'm obviously burdened with the excitement of the Asian world, but blogs like Venepoetics remind me (as if news reports of López Obrador in Mexico could let me forget) of my attraction to the literature & politics of Latin America. Somewhere in here I should mention that from where I'm sitting, the best translators working in English all translate from the Spanish: Eliot Weinberger, Edith Grossman, Gregory Rabassa, Kent Johnson, Forrest Gander, and more. Many factors contribute to this, I'm sure--it's always easiest to like the work of translators who know languages you don't--but whether my interest in Spanish literature is because I'm drawn to their translations or whether my interest in translation from Spanish is because I'm drawn to Latin American literature isn't, in the end, as important as the quality of both the work and the translation.

So in that case, sí se puede.

2006-09-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

LINKS

I have added new links to the right.

The first two new additions were linked one day from Chinabounder's (now defunct, or at least invitation-only) Sex in Shanghai blog (see post below, 8/19/06). They were advertised as endlessly more informative or interesting than the Chinabounder blog itself, and judging from what I've read, I have to agree. Chinese--Beyond the Textbook is a truly useful site for anyone learning Chinese or (especially) living in China. One of the difficulties of learning any language is learning the most common expressions or phrases that don't end up in your textbook or your teacher's lesson plan. Without the system of cognates to rely on for an English-speaker, Chinese can get particularly exclusive at this point. This blog seems to seek out the most practical and at the same time foreboding Chinese knowledge, and present it with technical and technological accuracy to the Chinese afficionado.

If Chinabounder is, as some reports have claimed, the creation of a group of performance artists somewhere between Andy Kaufman and Howard Stern, Fanfusuzi 凡夫俗子 is a site by an artist (or artists) engaged in China with an interest in challenging without alienating its readers. Consider its masthead slogan, China in English: perception is an act of translation. We also use what we cannot understand. The result is a panopticon of surreal essays ("The secret to travel in China," my dad said to me when I first went in 1995, supplanting André Breton's Mexico with my own China, "is to accept the surreal as the real.") about what confronts the foreigner in China. The most recent post at the moment settles on the parallel between urban planning and learning to read.

wood s lot was shown to me by a contributor to CipherJournal whose piece had been linked from this literary link log. What many blogs seem to be for the political intelligencia, linking to news and political analysis around the (English-speaking) web, wood s lot is for readers of poetry: links to some of the best literary writing around.

The fact that wood s lot and Damn the Caesars, along with its concomitant blog, contain, link to, and publish a grand overlap of writers that I read, publish, and know, is a strike against my earlier trepidations about the validity, let alone advisability, of a community of literary outsiders. For a long time I resisted notions of the post-avant, say, against the School of Quietude, as divisive or partisan and so forth. But as my understanding of politics grew, so did my understanding of the non-textual aspects of literature: community is important--it may in fact be why we read at all--and Rich Owens, editor and blogger of Damn the Caesars, seems to understand that.

The following two additions, Labor Notes and LabourStart, were additions acquired from the Damn the Caesars links page, and while I haven't perused them yet, I am glad to see another hint of literature and labor concerned about each other.

2006-09-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION

I was reminded today of the billboards I've seen in China, advertising for the company 國家電力. While I might recommend they translate their name National Electricity, the name staring down at everyone was, in Orwellian English, STATE POWER.

2006-09-04T00:38:00.000-04:00

I have been avoiding this blog for several days. Instead, I've been going through a long overdue update of www.CipherJournal.com, which in my laziness I can claim to be enough of a writing activity that I can supplant my blog entries with it.

Today, though, I watched the Loose Change documentary, expounding a conspiracy theory about the attacks of september eleventh. It has nothing to do with translation, labor, or academic culture, but I thought it was important enough to link from this page.

I don't have the wherewithal to disprove, or even counter, anything in the documentary, and I find it compelling and striking if not ultimately convincing. In the end, I'm not sure that the Republicans would sacrifice the stability of business for any goal. Nonetheless, I take the point of Loose Change to be one of sponsoring incredulity, rather than promoting any particular narrative itself. And if that is the case, then I throw in my support.

2006-08-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

THE BOX

Last night we saw the this year's Collaboraction performance Sketchbook, a gathering of sixteen short plays performed over two nights every year in Chicago. Last night, two of the plays, performed back to back, decried the always already inside-the-box thinking inherent in the phrase "think outside the box."

The second play probably should have come first, as its explanation and analysis was more elaborate. Coming second, after the idea had already been introduced, it came off as just more of the same boxed-in thinking.

2006-08-19T06:52:00.000-04:00

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Last time I wrote, I said I would spend the next few days turning my thoughts about Zukofsky, Olson, and Ginsberg into blog entries. That was in Beijing, on Monday. It's now Saturday in Chicago--where I've been since Wednesday--and I've written nothing and thought little about American poetry of the last seven decades. Instead I've been preoccupied with the move from one country to the next, wondering about our return to Connecticut, and wrestling with the formidable foe of jetlag (I can't understand why, after going to bed after midnight last night, I woke up before five this morning). And instead of poetry or fiction, I've been reading a blog someone pointed out to me called Sex and Shanghai 欲望上海.

The blog, authored by an English expat called Chinabounder, has become something of a site of controversy, and for obvious reasons. Chinabounder's blog does little more than chronicle his sexual exploits amongst women--mostly his former English students--in Shanghai, mixed in with a good dose of asides denigrating the Chinese government, Chinese society, Chinese men, and western women. He seems to consider himself part of the foreign vanguard in China's sexual revolution, and he often peppers his narratives with parentheticals about how Chinese women are reserved and shy and bound by society until he unfetters them with his cunnilingus, his anal-explorations, and his grand English cock.

Like any text, the Chinabounder blog is set amidst controversies and powerplays involving forces much greater than its own use of language. Here, as in many texts, the tensions seem to be involved in the interlocking power relations between women and men and China and the West, and the comments to his posts--both in support and in vitriol--reflect demands that Chinabounder take these forces into account. For his part, Chinabounder does take these forces into account, albeit in a way pretty dismissive of, say, his own complicitness in the networks of power that leave him more empowered, even within China, than Chinese natives themselves, and which tinge his remarks about Chinese men and the Chinese government [despite this, I have noticed an example to the contrary, where Chinabounder acknowledges being overpaid for his work as an English teacher in Shanghai compared to native Chinese teachers of English, and demonstrates that, short of giving his money to his Chinese colleagues, say, he does put in more work to reflect his higher earnings]. As for societal sexism, forget about it. Chinabounder demonstrates the conundrum of the non-selfish lover: in focusing on pleasing her, he gets much more pleasure out of the act. He's not non-selfish; rather, he is just more far-reaching in his selfishness. And inasmuch as he considers his purpose to pleasure all the attractive women of Shanghai, he is ultimately nothing more than self-serving.

The comments, while they tease out some of the issues I've just written about, are practically worthless. They offer a bland frat-boy kind of support or else an easily dismissible shrill about morality and delinquency. Chinabounder has taken his stand, and he doesn't seem interested in backing down. And here, I am about to surprise myself, I want to add: nor should he.

Despite all the geo-political and sexual problems of the Sex and Shanghai blog, the reason that I keep going back to it and looking for something more than titilation is the sheer honesty of the writing. By that I mean, Chinabounder may not be taking into account the larger social, political, or even economic factors of his life in China; and he may not be taking into account how his own culture shock and alienation cause him to find solace in the easy comfort of Chinese women and write about it on a blog that, until recently, was blocked in China; but he is aware of the position that he has taken. He is a strong English man who wants strong Chinese women (and, in the end, maybe even strong Chinese men); all the problematic intricacies of this position are, I think, best read in the light of the fact that he knows what he is doing. What he's doing may be any admixture of right and wrong to you and me, but he has taken his stand. And until the comments on his blog start reflecting more of a spirit of interaction than flaccid support or ranty attacks, I see no reason for Chinabounder to change his mind, or his actions [these last three words I write with caution: Chinabounder seems not to be hurting anyone on purpose, and I have no way of knowing whether his unintentional hurt of other people is large enough to warrant some real behavioral change on his part. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, I'll assume that the pain he instills is no greater than the pain brought on by any run-of-the-mill ex-boyfriend].

But I wrote this post wanting to come at answering the question, "What is literature?" If Sex and Shanghai involves itself with questions about gender equality, international parity, and sexual liberation, all in a way that is honest (if not quite responsible) and also conveys some of the emotion and psychology of at least one of its characters, then it is dealing with the same issues in the same way as some of the greatest works of literature. On top of which, Chinabounder seems particularly focused on questions of literature. A line tagged to his blog beneath his archived entries reads, "Everything which is written merely to please the author is worthless," and he has written about the low standards of English-language journalism in China. If I could compare him to an actual writer, I would pick Michel Houellebecq. This is based primarily on the circumstantial evidence--I have read only half of a Houellebecq novel, in a French I was ill equipped to comprehend--of a controversial male writer focused on writing about sex and society, eschewing sentiment and shibboleths and making enemies for his expressed opinions on cultures not his own. And while Chinabounder, for all his literary pretentions, does not possess the command of style to make him comparable to Hoellebecq, he nonetheless is focused on writing and engaged in the world he's writing in. To me, that means that Sex and Shanghai can be read as literature. And I wonder if that changes anything at all.

2006-08-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

I began this blog with a promise to be strict with myself, to write every day in at least some format. At times I was afraid that my blogging had ovewhelmed my ability to write in other genres--poetry and translation, particularly--because blogging is so much more readily avaiable and requires much less precision and concision. And yet, in the month that I (thought I) didn't have blogspot access, I realized that my writing habit was held together by the linchpin of the blog: if I weren't conscientious about updating my blog, I would have no impetus to do any real writing whatsoever. Perhaps the idea of publication, or public accountability, fueled the drive, but regardless, I brought a fountain pen to Beijing but never filled it with ink.

While I wasn't writing, I was reading more poetry than I had earlier achieved. Though that didn't translate itself into translating--something else I thought I'd get to while in Beijing--it did mean that I filled in some gaps in "contemporary" American poetry (I also finished some novels, finally, but I suppose I'll write more on that later): Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a bit of Robert Duncan (I also read, and reviewed for future publication, the new English translation of Jacques Roubaud's latest). Because I still largely understand very little of the work of each of these poets, I'll take advantage of this space to process through my reading of their poetry.

I'll spend the next few days turning my thoughts into blog entries, but today I'd like to spill some general comments about the three poets I read this summer. First, I made a conscious decision to read the poets in chronological order. The question of context has always troubled me: in the past, I went as far as to deny it, idealizing a context-free purely textual innocence of literature, and while I certainly no longer support such naive demands of a text, I do think that at some level any piece of literature needs to be able to stand on its own. Of course, the more I interrogate the phraseology of "standing on its own," the more I realize that nothing ever can: even the most basic text is dependent on a knowledge of the language, and all texts are at some level social, referential, and dependent on something beyond themselves. And so I figured that one could read Zukofsky best after reading Pound, and read Olson best after reading Zukofsky and Pound, and read Duncan best after reading Olson.

[Ginsberg I threw in there as something else to contend with before I got to Duncan, but in many ways reading Ginsberg was the biggest personal challenge for myself. I went through a week-long Beat phase, just like everyone else, in high school (I remember my parents wondering who I was on the phone arguing with when really I was reading Howl out loud), but after a (not much) deeper look at their surface facility, I gave up on them: a bit too much style and not enough substance, I figured. I also trace my disillusionment with the Beats to two coincidences surrounding Ginsberg. First is the eminent teachability of Howl and "America," which I consider more a problem of the poem than of teachers: the poem lend themselves more easily to tight explanation than to exploratory re-reading. Second is the question of where else someone in the '90s is going to look for more Ginsberg work: that decade was a big lowpoint of his writing, and it was easy to give up on ol' Allen and his friends.]

But in 20th century literature, which if nothing else has broken the idea of the line, why should literary history be so linear? Why should I read Zukofsky only after having read Pound, Duncan only after reading Olson? If I really wanted to give myself a firm background before fiddling with the foreground, I probably should have read all of Marx, Shakespeare, and Melville, too, before touching Zukofsky or Olson. I probably should have learned Chinese before reading Pound, instead of learning Chinese because of reading Pound. In fact, the fact that I read Pound before knowing Chinese should be enough to kick me away from a strict adherence to literary history as a cause-&-effect program. And yet, for some reason I still believe that influence is traceable, and that literature develops, if not towards some teleology, then at least upon the advances made by the previous generations. At the moment I'm at a loss to say whether this is maturity or regression on my part, but it did make it easier to pull those books off the shelf, rather than stay staring at the bindings, wondering whom I should read first.

2006-08-13T09:38:00.000-04:00

I read a review today of Howard Goldblatt's translation of Su Tong's novel My Life as Emperor 我的帝王生涯. The review, by Rong Cai, whom I take to be a non-native speaker of English, ended with the following praise of the translation:

The English translation matches the aesthetic appeal of Su Tong's work masterfully. It is every bit as graceful, vivid, and dynamic as the original. At points the translation even surpasses the original, without sacrificing accuracy. Two examples should suffice. The Chinese description "用一种讥讽的语气对兰妃说 " is rendered as "I heard Empress Peng say to Lady Han, her voice dripping with sarcasm …." Later in the story, the expression "我看见达渔醉醺醺地闯入繁心殿 " is translated as "seeing him weave drunkenly into Abundant Hearts Hall." The italicized words in the quoted not only convey the meaning of the original, they enhance its descriptive power. Examples like these testify to the craft of the translator and the dexterity and care with which he handles the job. Reading the novel in English is a delicious treat.

Such praise tells us as much about the experience of English for a non-native speaker as it does about Goldblatt's method of translation. Translating the image of weaving into a sentence that describes a stuporous intrusion is a departure from the language of the original text for the sake of the English readership's visualization. Removed from the context of its full paragraph, we can't judge it as good or bad--perhaps a nearby sentence involves weaving in a less immediately translatable manner, and Goldblatt makes up for it here--but regardless the gyst seems to be for a target-centered practice of translation. And Rong Cai acts as a target-language reader, responding to the poeticism of the English over the more direct description of the Chinese.

And yet, such a gesture is not in itself reliable. What about that phrase "dripping with sarcasm"? To me, this is a cliché, to be avoided in original writing and to be used with caution in translation. But what is interesting about clichés is that they got that way because of the overt beauty of their descriptive powers: "I'm being eaten alive" would be, without the context of everyone else having said it, an impressively vivid way to describe being attacked by mosquitoes; "a public relations nightmare" could be a frightening concept if the people who uttered the phrase did not vastly outnumber the slight number of people unlucky enough to have bad dreams about public relations. The lyricism of the cliché falls victim to its own attractiveness, and an originally potent expression is undermined not by being inaccurate, but by being overused.

As a native speaker with a trained sensitivity to the language, I respond negatively to "dripping with sarcasm." Rong Cai, however, seems to come to English with more innocent eyes and ears. The question, then, is whether we share her innocence when reading her review of Goldblatt's translation. Can we, like her, appreciate the cliché for its descriptive merit, forgetting about the rot it's accumulated in being passed around by so many hands? Can this phrase transcend its context and arrive at the pure level of poetical judgment? Is this where Benjamin's elusive Reinesprache really resides?

If I say no, that I can't appreciate the cliché for its poetry, it is for reasons that show me both target-centered and source-centered in my judgment of translations. If I can enjoy the addition of "weaving" to the image of a drunken stumble, I do so because as I read English, I employ English standards of quality; and unlike Rong Cai, "dripping with sarcasm" just doesn't cut it for me. On the other hand, I expect translation to be a reflection of what I am not reading--that is, a reflection of the original language--and when I read a cliché, I am never sure if it is a reflection of a cliché in the original, or else a flaw in the translator's execution. That uncertainty prevents me from being able to accept--or even deny--a cliché innocently, as I would if I were reading an original composition. In fact, I still can't tell if Goldblatt wrote "dripping with sarcasm" out of laziness or out of skill: just as another sentence in the paragraph could have employed the metaphor of weaving, so could a nearby sentence in Su Tong's Chinese have relied on a cliché. And if that cliché didn't turn into English well, the translator could now use this opportunity to reflect the author's style, cliché and all, in this sentence. Even if I expect a translation to reflect something else, I do not demand that that reflection come off in a one-to-one correspondence.

Earlier in the last paragraph of Rong Cai's review, from which I took the earlier quotation, she writes:

One can never overstate Professor Goldblatt's contribution to the field. Thanks to his tireless and elegant efforts, many works by contemporary Chinese writers in the mainland and Taiwan are now available in English for students and general readers of Chinese literature.

I certainly agree, and I temper any criticisms--to the extent that they are criticisms--with the knowledge that without Goldblatt's translations, many of us would have much less to talk about.

And as for clichés, when we come across them in translation, they actually stop acting as clichés: rather than passing by without notice, an example of poetic energy gone to waste, they stick. We stop. We pay attention. We examine, appreciate or discard, but in the end, a cliché in a translation is, in fact, no longer a cliché at all.

2006-08-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

by way of covering the gap of the unwritten past without writing too much in the present, here is something I wrote after we returned from a weekend trip to Pingyao:

Unless you’re going to a beach, you travel to learn. And usually the learning comes when you think you don’t need to be paying attention (last Friday we went to a play & I learned as much about China by watching the young audience fiddle with their cell phones than I did by watching what happened on the stage).

We left Beijing at 6:00 on Saturday morning to drive to Pingyao 平遙, one of China’s “ancient cities”—along with Dali 大理 and Lijiang 麗江 in Yunnan 雲南—that have been preserved or reconstructed to look the way they did over a hundred years ago in the Qing dynasty 清朝. Pingyao is celebrated for its city wall, one of the remaining few amidst thousands that were torn down since the Communist revolution decided they were relics of imperialism and an obstacle to regional development. In the middle of Shanxi 山西 province, a mountainous and rocky region whose greatest industry is coal-mining, Pingyao managed to be the financial capital of the Qing dyasty in the nineteenth century. Midway on the trade route between Xi An 西安 and Beijing 北京, Pingyao was where China’s first banks and money-wiring systems began, and today you buy a single ticket to gain entry to the old banks, the city wall, and the houses of the capitalists and merchants who were responsible for Pingyao’s prominence. In a forecasted lesson on globalization, the banks failed after the republican revolution of 1911 removed governmental patronage and created an influx of foreign banking capital to coastal cities like Shanghai 上海. In a lesson about China’s unique art-capital-politics relationship, Pingyao seems to have been a financial center without any artistic prevalence to speak of,—compare this to another pre-modern financial center, Florence, where the money-makers became patrons of the arts—a foreshadowing of Beijing’s cultural importance despite the financial preeminence of Shanghai.

Our first stop was not in Pingyao, actually, but at the Wang Family Mansion 王家大院, about an hour away. This huge compound of networked courtyards was built for the vastly successful Wang family, who eventually rose to prominence as a genealogy of officials out of the somewhat more humble background of a tofu-seller. It’s something of a novelty considering the kind of Chinese society I study—granted, I study a Chinese society about a thousand years prior to this—where the merchant class was denigrated and considered unfit for officialdom. Today a museum, the mansion is also where movies such as Raise the Red Lantern 大紅燈籠高高挂 were filmed, but aside from that it’s also where some lingering debates on communism and Chinese policy can be overheard. Communists would say that such a large compound housing the privileged in such an impoverished environment is irresponsible, while capitalists would say that if it weren’t for this compound hiring architects, builders, artisans, and craftsmen, the area would have been even more destitute. Immediately after the revolution, land redistribution brought a lot of people into the compound, but today no one lives in the museum. I saw more advertisements and propaganda for party membership on miniature billboards and posters in the parking lot of the mansion than I’ve seen almost anywhere else in China, too. What it all means, I’m not quite sure.

Pingyao is much more popular amongst European visitors than American, though I’m not sure why. We saw lots of French tourists, and I imagine that in French guides to China Pingyao is given some kind of prominence. In the old city, the only place anyone can stay is in old guesthouses in imperial courtyard style. It’s pretty impressive to walk through, but the beds are about as hard as is imaginable. The food, too, is pretty lousy all around. A lot of China’s ancient cities become hangouts for backpackers from the west, and so all the guesthouses advertise selling western food like omelets and hamburgers. The problem is that the chefs here have never seen—let alone tasted—western food the way it’s supposed to be, so the result is a mishmash of some pretty unpalatable cuisine. That said, the Chinese food is no better in Pingyao. Just like the tourist stands, selling the same crap at the same prices, the restaurants have figured out a way to serve lousy food to people who won’t be around long enough to do make any lasting complaints or establish any competition to undercut the saturation.

Despite all this, I probably learned most about China today from the driving. A while ago I read a New York Times Magazine article about the roads in China and learned that in 2004 Chinese road deaths accounted for 21% of the world total, and every day in China more people die in car accidents than died in the entire SARS crisis. Of course, SARS was a crisis because the disease threatened business; on the roads, the deaths are just a part of the collateral damage of an improving economy, and the government doesn’t want to do much to limit driving because that itself would threaten business. The highways themselves are new, and so are in pretty good condition, but the driving doesn’t quite match the standard. Police are practically nonexistent on the roads, and speeding is instead monitored by radar-powered cameras installed on periodic intervals of signs and posts. I wondered for a while about whether this was a good or bad way of enforcing traffic obeisance, and I finally decided it wasn’t good: essentially, everyone speeds until they see an electric eye, and then brake as quickly as possible so they don’t get ticketed. Such rash braking is of course a traffic hazard for anyone else driving, and besides, the problem on Chinese roads isn’t cars going too fast, but too slow. Especially in Shanxi, where mined coal needs to be distributed to the rest of the country, tucks line the roads like slow elephants. When these trucks were designed and engineered, probably thirty years ago, highways didn’t exist, and so no one needed to build engines that could carry tons and also drive at over a hundred kilometers per hour. Today, though, that means that these trucks are going about half the speed of the sedans and passenger cars from the cities. It’s actually a good literalization of the gap in China today between the developing cities and the underdeveloped rural areas: the cities / small cars keep getting faster, but their speed and safety is blocked by the larger, slower rural areas / trucks. And in the end, this mismatch is in no one’s best interest. To get past the trucks, cars pass on the right shoulders of the highways, a considerable danger not only for people passing on the left, but also for road crews who might be walking on the shoulder, too. Akiko’s dad is much better and safer behind the wheel than the majority of Chinese drivers, but obeying the law most of the time where no one obeys the law at all still doesn’t make you very observant, in the end. There’s a lot of swerving, a lot of zigzagging, and not a lot of looking in mirrors.

And then there are the traffic jams. On the way there we took the more direct route from Beijing to Taiyuan to Pingyao, but saw on the other side of the highway traffic at a standstill for miles. We didn’t want to find ourselves in a two-lane parking lot on the way back, so we took the highway less under construction on the way back, from Taiyuan to Datong to Beijing. The road was practically empty from Datong through Hebei province towards Beijing, until we got to where we needed to pay the toll at the end of the line in Hebei. Two kilometers from the toll booth we hit a traffic standstill. An hour later, we had swerved through enough trucks to make it to the gate, only to be cut off by an SUV from Inner Mongolia right at the tollbooth. I had had enough of this kind of aggression, and so I got out of the car to yell at and berate the driver. He offered a weak apology and I went back to our car, fuming over how once upon a time in modern China the people must have believed in cooperation, solidarity, and unity, but somewhere in the Cultural Revolution their trust had been eradicated, and pro-market reforms and the disappearance of the word “comrade” never reinstituted that kind of trust.

In the end, my blow-up against the driver from Inner Mongolia was probably futile in addition to being culturally arrogant and potentiall dangerous: he may think twice about cutting someone in line again (most likely not), but it didn’t even matter. Past the tollbooth was another twelve kilometers of completely stopped traffic. The people selling fruit, ramen noodles, and beer—yeah, beer—at the side of the road told us that it’s like this every day. At the entryway of Beijing, the police have established a checkpoint for all trucks to weigh freight so that they don’t wreck the roads and bridges of the city, and this caused a permanent traffic jam extending for a virtual ever. Mining companies pay by the driver, not by the kilogram, and so they overload their trucks to decrease expenses. The central government has asked for each province to weigh freight trucks, but because they don’t want to impede business, they tend not to. So the result is that Beijing literally has a greater burden to bear. Theoretically, there’s a lane for passenger cars, but with poor signage and truck drivers who don’t care, the passenger cars are stuck trying to navigate through a jungle of parked trucks and no way out.

One of the women selling ramen and beer offered some of the cars a deal: turn around, go back through the toll gate the other way, and she’d take us to another road that led to another highway into Beijing. She’d charge 100 yuan total for the job, and eventually three or four cars took her up on the offer. Each of our cars paid a deposit—twenty of the thirty yuan per car—and headed through back through the closed toll gate beside the one we’d just passed through. The plan was to drive along the right shoulder against the direction of the stalled traffic, then off an on-ramp coming from the other direction, merge into another tollbooth line, and then take a back road to another highway, at which point our guide would collect the rest of the money before we went off on our merry way. Of course, going against traffic on the shoulder of the road requires that the shoulder be accessible; it wasn’t. A truck had installed itself there and was happily passing some amounts of traffic until it came against the car in front of us, in which our guide was sitting as a backseat driver. Seeing the mess, she took the opportunity while her driver was on his cell phone to get out of the car and run away, very literally taking the money and running. So now traffic was stalled in both directions, until about forty minutes later a cop showed up and, surprisingly, not only didn’t ticket us for any number of counts—such as heading the wrong way on a highway, driving on the shoulder, soliciting an unregistered tour guide, and more—but directed traffic so that the truck before us on the shoulder had a place to merge into on the highway and we could drive on a clear path and descend down the onramp.

Which we did. And an hour and a half later we were home.

2006-08-11T01:23:00.000-04:00

I'm amazed.

We've been in Beijing now for a month and five days, leaving in less than a week, and I'd long since given up on trying to access my blog here. Attempts to read any blogspot-hosted url has been denied, until, randomly, I get here today.

So much to write, and yet, given the backlog of thoughts, how can I do so?

2006-07-02T00:36:00.000-04:00

We spent the last two days driving from Connecticut to Chicago.

My dad has moved since a year and a half ago, the last time we were here. That house was also not the house I grew up in. Walking through this house and seeing the same art, furniture, design, and gestures of personality & style, all in a different location, I get a twin sense of familiarity and newness that is, I think, equivalent to reading a good translation.

Without the essential newness, the familar grows old. Without the basic sense of familarity, the new constitutes no surprise.

2006-06-28T22:38:00.000-04:00

Part of what some people enjoy about running is the meditative aspect. The repetition, the focus on the body as a way to transcend the body, the time to observe and think and not be inundated with media. I must be too afraid of my own thoughts, or even afraid of confronting the emptiness of myself, because I seem to require--or at least so far I rely on--the mechanism of isolation and alienation, the iPod.

A few days ago I wrote about having a hard time understanding poems heard. But the idea of passing my running time catching up on contemporary American poetry didn't leave me, so I've been downloading interiews with poets on PENNSound. I've run to interviews with Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Charles Bernstein, Ron Padgett, and Ron Silliman. Most of these interviews run for (multiples of) half-hour segments, which is the duration I aim to stay running for.

Today I listened to Ron Silliman. Ron sez:

nobody argues for globalization more powerfully than Karl Marx. And in many respects, the whole failure of the Actually Existing Socialist countries in the 20th century all comes down to the real simple observation that socialism in one country can't work because capital can always flee and go somewhere else, and that socialism doesn't even become part of the agenda until in fact basically the kind of global markets, that we're just beginning to see the first hints of, at this moment in time, bring to offer. But that's going to require having a teacher's union that involves northwestern China as well as Beverly Hills.

I began reading Silliman's blog because of the hype. I worked past my prior distaste for Language poetry because of the politics. When I learned that Silliman had been executive editor of the Socialist Review, I got more intrigued: my first understanding of Language writing was essentially that it was incomprehensible, both as a means and an end. Understanding that its proponents, advocates, and writers are also poètes engagés concerned not only with shaping language but with shaping the political environment in which language gets used contributed to a larger change within myself. As I began to become more open to scholarship and literature with a particular political engagement, I began to become more open to Language writing.

My academic experiences, and my experiences organizing for an academic union, have been at the heart of this change. And when I came upon Silliman's sense of globalization and solidarity and historical change, I was heartened to hear that an international teacher's union--with my area of study even getting a coincidental mention--plays such a large role in Silliman's view of political possibility. It makes my urges, upon reading the news about China recently, to organize an independent miner's union China (urges which would no doubt get me expelled from that country for a long time), a little less sharp. I'll cast down my bucket where I am.

2006-06-28T00:09:00.000-04:00

The 14th century Chinese fiction 三國演義 Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins with an ominous warning of historical truism: "話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分" It is said that the great tendency under heaven is that the long split must unite, and the long united must split.

As my own tendency recently has been to accept, and understand, how the larger patterns of historical change play out against individual will and social action, I have not been able to let go of more specific considerations of the BuffPo list's now ended debates about postmodernism. While my economic understanding is too shallow to follow what Frederic Jameson means by referring to "late capitalism," I have been considering the "cultural logic" that is postmodernism. I've also come across a blog about the particular Frenchness of postmodernism. The idea is that most great thinkers of postmodernism are French simply because postmodernism is a particularly French phenomenon: who better to discuss the new tensions of decentralization against the impulses of centralization than the intellectuals in a country that has lost its central position?

Though I'm hesitant to throw in my support on an argument that has that ominous tone of xeno- (and especially franco-) phobia, something in there compels me. If history does determine much of what we as individuals do and believe, then the postmodern views of French intellectuals exists in relation to their experiences within a decentered--and decentering--Europe since World War II. What was long united had to split, and that split caused a new ethic. That ethic, that cultural logic, is postmodernism.

Two questions follow, one more obvious than the other: if postmodernism is a particularly European phenomenon, then why do so many Americans--whose centrality has only risen since WW2--also follow this postmodernist ethic? And if decenteredness is our historical dominant, then how do we explain the fact that some people--in America and, presumably, other countries--do not adhere to this postmodernist ethic?

Inasmuch as the two questions are related, I guess I'll start with the second. If what The Romance of the Three Kingdoms says is true, and contries with a long history of unification are bound to break into contending regions and vice-versa, then I suppose that creates for individuals an opportunity to perceive the new era and tweak their beliefs accordingly, or else to long for the past era and maintain faith in its cultural logics. The former is progressive, and the latter is conservative (although that said, I don't think one is inherently more appropriate than the other; that would have to depend on the necessities of the moment). In very broad strokes, I could say that during the Warring States, after the unity of the Zhou dynasty, Confucius proposed holding on to a non-existent morality; the Daoists opted to embrace the uncertainty of a less controlled or centralized political realm. I don't know much about European history, but I'm sure that after the fall of Rome, some welcomed the opportunity to toss off the old notions of Roman superiority, while others longed for the old days of a stable empire.

Today, I think we're in a similar situation, made somewhat more complex because, in many ways, our global cultural logic is one where modernism and postmodernism are fighting each other in a thousand different local arenas. To take the United States as one example, our centrality is something the conservatives have succeeded in maintaining, but our participation in a decentered, multipolar world is something the progressives insist on as necessary. Though they scare me, I want to aknowledge the American conservatives' success. Then again, the fact that they are part of a fight against the postmodern in a multitude of local arenas also means that the decentered, always already local postmodernism is already upon us.

And you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone.

2006-06-26T21:43:00.000-04:00

Today the 3rd anniversary of my marriage to Shenxin. I've been trying to write more poetry in the past few days, and have been struck by how strange it feels. I also spent over seventy dollars buying poetry books today.

I know too little about either of these writers to make any point about this sentence, which struck me as I read what Ron Silliman had to say today: "Walter Benjamin – him I see as philosophy’s Jack Spicer. Both were obsessed with the task of the translator." It may be the closest Silliman has ever gotten in his poetics to discussing the element of translation in any meaningful way, and if he hadn't closed his comments box (a temporary move that, given the nastiness that had been percolating within, I support) I'd ask him to expand. Maybe I'll email him and make the suggestion...

I'm reminded that I was handed this blog because I wanted to comment on someone else's post. My comment, go figure, was about Silliman and his absent awareness of translation. Once I believed I could never escape Ezra Pound; now I wonder if I'll ever be able to escape Ron Silliman.

2006-06-22T00:35:00.000-04:00

An argument exists about Chinese (and likely any non-Western) poetry in the twentieth century: the so-called liberation from form and traditionalism was an extension of Western colonial power, and writers who sought to "modernize" were in fact internalizing their sense of inferiority in the face of Western military and economic domination, thereby buying into Western supremacy and selling themselves into slavery. The "liberation" of twentieth century Chinese poets on formal lines is, according to this view, no more real than the "liberation" of Tibet at Chinese Communist hands (and arms): to believe in such a "liberation" requires a larger faith in the political ascendancy of free-verse, say, or Maoism.

But what about faith in the political ascendancy of free-verse? While I've gone back and forth in my own agreement or disagreement with this argument, something I've wondered most is whether a break from traditional poetic forms could be equivalent to its own political movement. To look at it this way might require that we switch from viewing free-verse poetry itself as the end, but rather to consider a particular movement within the new poetries of the twentieth century: Surrealism.

Picking Surrealism as a poetic movement to be read politically is more strategic than innocent: while contemporary Chinese poets are argued as being under the influence of Western domination, the Western writing their poetry resembles most is Surrealism. But inasmuch as Surrealism is a movement that I see as particularly focused on finding the psychologically, mythically, and poetically local, I wonder whether that is enough to counteract claims of its colonialism. In addition, Surrealism and its later adherents have been particularly politically driven. César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire (not coincidentally both translated by Clayton Eshleman) were (are) both second-generation Surrealists with a vested interest in local non-Western realities and in political expression. And before them, André Breton wrote manifesti on Surrealism with Leon Trotsky. So if we can collide, temporarily, an international Surrealist movement with the Comintern, what would Trotsky have to say about whether Chinese poetry in the twentieth century had succumbed to Western domination?

Anyhow, the above is an odd conceit and an underdeveloped thesis, and I'm not sure if I'll ever pursue it in writing to its scholarly ends. But the fixture of Trotsky, a man I know little about, and yet whose "what if" potentiality has at times both attracted and repelled me, is one I wanted to rely on as a meeting grounds between the poetic and the political, or between the avant-garde and the vanguard (kind of the way that Joyce, Tzara, and Lenin meet in Tom Stoppard's Travesties). And then a scholar I know sent me a copy of an article in which he brings up Trotsky condemning the avant-gardists--the Futurists, particularly--in Literature & Revolution and consequently in Soviet policy in the twenties.

This went against the image I had of Trotsky (in fact, the article said that while Trotsky & Stalin didn't agree on much, they both had a notorious distaste for Modernist experimentation in art), which comes from incomplete knowledge of him living with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico City. I should read Literature & Revolution, but I'm rarely one to wait until I have complete knowledge before forming an impression. I asked my scholar friend about Trotsky, and he wrote back that Trotsky got nicer after being exiled, hanging out with the only people brave enough to accommodate him--the avant-garde. Then again, he mentioned that after Trotsky was assassinated, the one to secure the murderer with an exit visa was Neruda. The poets-and-politics question was one that, as a scholar, about which he'd never been able to come to a clean conclusion.

As a scholar, the poets-and-politics question is, thankfully, endlessly complex: we get to discuss the individual cases ad infinitum, and it keeps us employed. But as a political activist and organizer as well as a writer, I have a different take on it. I wrote to my scholar friend:

I think it's nearly always a bad move to reduce the size of your own bargaining unit. The hubris of those in power, scrambling for a tighter grasp, allows them to cut others out; and whether you're a Chinese writer in the 1930s arguing for "art for life's sake" over "art for art's sake," a Soviet leader deciding on communist artistic policy, or an American worker tangled up against illegal immigration, the short-sighted solution is to be exclusive. Such a decision is, I think, based on laziness and an overestimation of the strength of one's group; why else provoke potential allies--the art for art's sake artists, the non-Social Realist artists, the illegal immigrant workers ripe for organizing--to oppose you? It's efficiency-model management, and it rarely works. What does work, I find, is more work, even if it means organizing illegal immigrants into a union or Futurists and Modernists into an understanding of the social ramifications of art.

Even from the angle of political organizing this conversation doesn't end here. But if we can remember, at the times we are scholars, politicians, and artists, to keep the long-sighted view rather than follow the efficiency model, then I think we're moving in the right direction.

And as for Surrealism and Chinese poetry, the question is not simply a matter of what historical or material conditions a poet from any country has been given, but rather a matter of what a poet does in responding to, and making art out of, those conditions.

2006-06-21T00:21:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine wrote an article titled "Organizing Rights at the 'Global University,'" which chronicles the experiences of organizing international (mostly Chinese) students, researchers, and teachers as part of a struggle for an academic labor union at Yale. Her article is published in WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, but to read it online, you have to pay a fee. You can either subscribe to the journal or buy rights to access the article for a limited time. I logged on to Yale's off-campus network, but I still couldn't access the journal (though logging on through Yale's server gets me on to jstor and Project Muse sites). I emailed my friend to ask if she got royalties from the payments her article earned, and she told me--predictably--that she does not. She also sent me a .pdf of her article, which I look forward to reading.

The zeitgeist seems to be pressing in on the question of public access to scholarship. Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman have both mentioned it, along with links to the New Yorker article about James Joyce's grandson, the Franco of his estate. Then there's the congressional debate written up by Inside Higher Ed, and of course the comments at Silliman's blog, which have grown exponentially since I read them a few days ago, and various links from those comments, such as this one.

At the same time, I've got friends who are going to law school, and say they are interested in Intellectual Property law. I don't know what that really means--you could say you're interested in labor law and then end up union-busting for a firm like Jackson Lewis--so perhpaps my friends interested in intellectual property law want to fight the good fight, and perhaps they want to fight the bad fight.

Both my parents were art dealers, and so I understand the infrastructural need for companies that represent and work for artists, musicians, poets, and scholars. I wouldn't expect any novelist to take home 100% of the sales from her book, assuming she didn't publish it herself, and so if a journal such as WorkingUSA needs to charge individuals so that it can stay in business, then I could be convinced to pay the price. But when my friend doesn't get anything in return after I've entered my credit card number and hit return, then The Journal of Labor and Society is disrespecting its workforce, and I'm going to ask my friend for a free copy of the article instead.

Likewise, if I see a pirated CD for sale on the streets of Beijing, I figure that the profit I'm cutting into is not the artist's, but rather the record company's. And I have no compunction about buying music or movies when it's Sony who has to suffer. For while I said that I understand the necessity of an infrastructure in which a company works for the artist, what I do not support is how we have "progressed" to a point where the artist works for the infrastructure. And inasmuch as my upbringing is in the art world, I'd say that the gauge for deciding who is working for whom would be the art dealer's fifty percent. If more than fifty percent of sales is going to the company, then I think that means that the artist is working for the company, and not the other way around.

I think I've mentioned before that I view scholars and artists equally as workers--cultural workers--whose work deserves respect and proper economic treatment as work. Many figures, such as Stephen James Joyce but also anti-academic artists or poets of all kinds, have an outdated view of scholars as a bourgeoisie elite, and want to leave the creative arts uncontaminated by their ilk. This kind of infighting is, it's obvious to me, counterproductive, and keeps the publishing industries--whether Sony or Blackwell Synergy--in control of the discussion, and of the policy.

2006-06-19T14:17:00.000-04:00

I was pointed to Regender from a friend's blog. The site, which runs a logarithm through other urls, reconfigures the pronouns and proper names of any text in English so that "she" becomes "he," and vice-versa, while "Charles" becomes "Charlene," and "Emma" turns into "Emmanuel." I'm in favor of this kind of a rethinking of sex and gender, particularly in a making the stone feel stony method of linguistic enstrangement, but what interests me about the Regender site is that it calls itself "a different kind of translator."

What kind of translator would that make it, then? One of the terms I've become familiar with since coming to graduate school is "cultural translation." It's an act of finding, or examining, the cultural equivalents between languages, in effect translating not the text so much as the context. God and Allah are, I would imagine, cultural translations of each other, serving equivalent purposes in each cultural context. The fact that both words refer to the same cosmic identity makes the issue somewhat more complicated, I would think.

The first time I heard about a cultural translation was when I was describing my experience teaching English to kindergartners in Taiwan. The school I was working for knew of the benefits of teaching--especially language teaching--through song, and so I was supposed to teach an English children's song to the Taiwanese students. The song the school found a language tape for was the English version of "Frère Jacques," "Brother John." To explain the context of the lyrics to the students, the language tape explained that it was about your brother (the language tape spoke in second-person) John, who was asleep while his alarm clock was going off, and he was going to be late for school. This struck me as quite distinct from what I had heard as the original context for the French "Frère Jacques"; as I understood it, Frère Jacques was not "brother Jacques" but Friar Jacques, a medieval priest who had suffered from the plague. The ringing bells weren't waking him up not because he had overslept, but because he was dead.

This all came back at me in one instant when I was riding on the Métro in Paris, reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, as a young girl was singing "Frère Jacques." In that moment, I literally forgot what language I was living in, reading and hearing English or French.

These examples surrounding "Frère Jacques" and its various permutations are all acts of cultural translation. While the text itself may change, the question really is how the context changes as words pass through different languages. How did hearing "Frère Jacques" in French--so familiar that it made the English of Orwell's writing about Paris seem strange--alter my understanding of my own context? Or, how does a Taiwanese children's language lesson alter the meaning of a song as it passes from French to English and from medieval Europe to postmodern Taiwan (then again, imagine if the language tape had explained that "Brother John" would not wake up?).

Nevertheless, we can understand why these are instances of cultural translation because in one way or another they are instances of a transfer between languages, whether textual or contextual. But as for the Regender site, we're dealing with a cultural translation that plays on contextual changes surrounding a specific kind of change within texts only in English (I checked some sites in French, and masculine and feminine had not been destabilized, though names such as Dominic / Dominique do get swapped). Certainly Regender doesn't present translation in any strict sense of the word, but inasmuch as it does enact a textual change that forces questions about the context--according to its website, those questions are,

What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places?
What would it look like if English had genderless pronouns?
What would it look like if English identified races the way it identifies gender?

though I couldn't find any way in which Regender identified race--then this "different kind of translation" can only be a cultural translation. But as I think about the impermanence of Regender's deconstruction (or reconstruction) of sex and gender stability, I wonder again about the impermanence of any kind of cultural translation. Running a website through Regender, I get a cute kick out of it, noticing how it functions--when I ran my own blog through, it turned the "MA" in my bio to the right into "MARK"--and appreciate its goals, but then I move away and, aside from writing a blog entry about it, don't look back. We can't really answer the questions that Regender proposes, because Regender has too much to overturn. Faced with this, "he" remains "he," "she" remains "she," and Jacqueline Derrida & Rolanda Barthes are always already men again.

What I find depressing is that this may be the fate of all cultural translation: after my strange moment in the Parisian Métro, I may re-tell the story, but in the transition from experience to narrative I am always certain what language I am speaking. While the Taiwanese children may imagine that "Brother John"--or even "Frère Jacques"--is about a brother sleeping through his alarm clock, their belief does not disrupt the song's true history (even given the possibility that my own story about the derivation of "Frère Jacques" is inaccurate). Worse, the obstacle that all translation faces, when viewed politically, may be too large to counter: translation will likely never succeed in dismantling the isolation of American literature.

True, not everyone, not even all translators and readers of translation, are bound to see this as the political goal of literature in translation. But if, to refer to an earlier entry, postmodernism is a recognition of the local, then my own desire is for American literary culture to see itself as one instance of the local, and yet still be a locality with a particular relationship to other, foreign, localities. The evidence of gender-political goals marks this as a pretty futile fight, but it's a fight I'm willing to take part in, nonetheless.

2006-06-18T01:51:00.000-04:00

Half an hour's worth of blogging deleted by a misplaced double-click. Damn. And they say the internet will save data. I must remind myself: technology exists to make our lives better. But oh, the ephemera of the written word.

Another try tomorrow, I guess.

2006-06-13T22:09:00.000-04:00

I know Chinglish and Franglais, but I never heard a good portmanteau for the combination of French and Chinese. I encountered this often enough while living amongst Chinese people in Paris: rather than 合同 hetong for "contract," I heard 工踏 gongta, an approximation of "contrat." And once in a movie theatre I heard someone behind me exclaim, "我差一點兒東貝了," emphasizing the word dongbei as a sinification of "tomber."

The vowels in French & Chinese are similar enough that in French-speaking countries, Chinese speakers can introduce French words in ways that make them sound at once Chinese and French. Though similar linguistic tricks take place amongst Chinese-speakers in the anglophone world (I hear "post-doc" pronounced as "pos-daw" stuck into the middle of Chinese sentences, when the speakers could pronounce "post-doc" perfectly well in an English phrase), the phenomenon of Chinglish usually happens with English words or phrases inserted into Chinese sentences with no concern for masking whether the word is or sounds like it could be Chinese.

Today, walking down the street, I heard someone say, "你要是想買一個 king-size 的
mattress 的話......" Certainly the word "mattress" (床墊) exists in Chinese, and if the speaker wanted to, he could produce a way of saying "king-size," too. But why didn't he want to?

Often English words get thrown into Chinese sentences because the grammatical structure of the Chinese sentence has itself been influenced by English syntax, meaning that Chinglish is born from a specific kind of translationese. The speaker has gotten so used to speaking English that he shapes his Chinese sentences according to English habits, and yet doesn't seem to realize it until the end of the sentence, where he has to throw in an English word to make it come out right. A Chinese person in China would be more likely to say, "我覺得這個問題非常有意思" than "我覺得這是一個非常有意思的問題" (the latter sounds more like what an American learning Chinese would say), but used to saying "I think this is a very interesting question" in English, the result might come out more like "我覺得這是一個非常interesting 的 question."

Another way that Chinglish gets employed is when the speaker has decided that Chinese doesn't have a good way of saying what needs to be said. My example about "king-size" might fall into this category (while "mattress" follows an English modifier better than would a Chinese noun). When I'm in China, I find anglophones peppering their English with Chinese words along these lines, filling in vocabulary gaps in English we didn't know until we started learning Chinese. Like, "yeah, man, he's pretty 厲害" (hmm, something about writing it that way seems strange, as if the word is too Chinese, needs to be pronounced with Chinese tones. More likely we'd say, "yeah, man, he's pretty lihai"). But then, Chinglish for anglophones in China becomes some kind of slang. "Want some 大麻 / dama?" when we're tired of other terms for "marijuana"; and "zenme yang?" as a universal (yeah, right) "what's up?" (even though native Chinese speakers would never use 怎麽樣 that way). I'm having a hard time coming up with good examples of Chinglish used by Anglophones in China; partly that's because I'm not in China right now, and partly it's because it's much more common for Chinese people to insert English into their Chinese than it is for Anglophones to insert Chinese into their English. The question is, why?

The most common Chinglish phrase, uttered by Chinese people in America, I can think of is, "他受到了一個 offer." In this case, the Chinglish sentence arises both for grammatical and lexicographic reasons: Chinese doesn't have a term that could directly translate "job-offer," but inasmuch as the sentence begins as a translation of "he received a..." then it's got to finish somehow. The translation, once begun, finds itself at a dead-end, and Chinglish is the only way out.

I get the impression that nouns and adjectives are more often anglicized in Chinglish phrases than are verbs. Then again, in academic Chinglish--that is, when Chinese speakers in Anglophone academic settings are speaking in Chinese--the more latinate English verbs will occasionally take the place of Chinese verbs. I might hear someone say, "我們現在要 interrogate 的是......", but here we're dealing with levels of diction, and I think this might be at the heart of the reason not only of what kind of Chinglish gets used, but why.

When people say that Chinese is hard, what they usually mean is that it's different from English; cognates between the two languages are practically non-existent, making Chinese harder to master for English-speakers than French or German. And yet, at the everyday level of diction and discourse, fluency is pretty easily attainable for Chinese students of English and for Anglophone students of Chinese. This is in part due to the great debt modern vernacular Chinese owes to translations from European languages. And yet, as levels of diction move away, either up or down, from our standard middle-c classroom octave language, the points of commensurability between English and Chinese get rarer and rarer. As we get more formal or more elevated in Chinese, assumptions that apply for English (and which also apply for French or Spanish and possibly German) no longer apply. I imagine this is because our higher registers of language are more reliant on the histories of education in our respective civilizations, which are in turn reliant on the histories of hierarchical power (we tend to speak to our teachers as we would speak to our emperors). And while hierarchies existed in classical China just as they did in classical Rome, they have produced different customs in our language today.

An example of all this, which I think is also an example of anti-Chinglish, comes from the other day when an American friend of mine and I were talking to two Chinese friends. As we often do, we were swapping between Chinese and English somewhat indiscriminately. One of our Chinese friends called my American friend weird, and he replied that he's always weird. But then he added, in Chinese, "but maybe it's more transparent right now." That weirdness might be transparent is, I think, a particularly American formation, mixing low-mid registers ("weird") with a mid-high register ("transparent"). Plainly, it didn't work in Chinese. In addition, the word he used for "transparent," 透明 touming, is a bit closer to "translucent," which I mention to accentuate the strangeness of the phrase: how would you react if someone said his weirdness were more translucent at the moment?

This is all evidence I present myself in trying to figure out why Chinese people add more English to their Chinese than Anglophones add Chinese to their English. My theory is that, given the academic setting in which I hear most Chinese speakers of Chinglish, compared to the very casual setting in which I hear Anglophones speaking Chinese, the tension between high-level English and high-level Chinese comes out more often for Chinese speakers. In other words, Chinese people are pushed to learn high-level English more often than vice-versa, and so Chinese people's Chinglish is mostly a function of the interface between those two domains of discourse. Converely, slang has (or did before MTV) a localizing impulse: in this group we speak differently from that group. When Anglophones in China speak a version of Chinglish that approximates slang, I think it's the result of that group-forming tendency.

And yet, for some reason, that reminds me of the French/Chinese words such as 東貝 dongbei / "tomber." I think I need to spend more time 考慮ing this question.

2006-06-13T00:36:00.000-04:00

I've started running (again--hopefully this time it'll take) and I've been bringing my iPod along, partly as distraction from my legs, and partly as a time-keeping device. I don't have a sports watch, and Shenxin has decided that her sports watch is unlucky, and keeps it hidden. I'm not superstitious, but I'm not exactly willing to go looking for it, either.

A few days ago I mentioned that I wanted to read Olson, Duncan, and Blau du Plessis. And somehow before I went running today I came upon the idea of browsing through the PENNsound page & downloading files of these three poets reading. And so as I was jogging today, I was listening to sections of Duncan's "Structure of Rime" and "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar."

I've heard much about, and have always believed, in the importance of sound to poetry. I remember Ezra Pound talking about how poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music, and I saw a line of Robert Pinsky's in an introduction to poetry describing poetry as a physical performance art, because the words had to go past the vocal chords for the poetry to come out of the mouth. And when I first heard a recording of William Carlos Williams reciting some of his poems, one track after a recording of Ezra Pound reading from his poetry, I understood how the tenor and timbre of each poet informed the kinds of lines they could write. Obviously, the vocal element of poetry is essential.

And yet as I ran along, Duncan was not distracting me from the pain in my shins. Not only that, I was having a hard time focusing on Duncan's poetry at all. I began fast-forwarding to writing this blog about how I've always had a hard time with poetry readings. At almost every poetry reading I've gone to, I've felt disappointed and distracted, disappointed mostly from feeling distracted. My mind wanders, both causing and contributing to an inability to focus on the poems being spake. Certainly my mind can drift when I read poetry (my initial distaste for footnotes in translation is because they interrupt the 'poetic instance' of reading the poem), but I can always go back and re-read the line. Perhaps the only time I've ever really maintained full attention at a reading (aside from attending poetry slams, which aren't readings, anyhow) was at a Gary Snyder event. I'd brought along my copy of Mountains and Rivers Without End, which he read from, and while this way I could follow along and maintain my focus, I remember being perhaps doubly disappointed, as Snyder's pauses and intonations seemed to have no bearing to his line-breaks as printed on the page. Can I ever win?

If I'm not the only person to experience such anxiety over poetry read aloud, I'll submit that we seem to have reached a moment of historical tension in terms of poetry readings. We are taught that poetry was originally song, and that even long after that, the experience of poetry was an audible, rather than silent, experience. And yet now our interactions with sounds more often than not comes equipped with visual action, or else is relegated to the background (and yet, as I write this, I think of how the telephone has taken over our lives). Likewise, the page has become more important to the spatial sense of much poetry, and the sonic elements that were once the domain of poetry have metamorphosed into a more subtle music. And while we know that poetry relies on the acoustic, just hearing a poem can no longer take the place of reading it. Perhaps the music of poetry has gotten too subtle for our ears to appreciate.

Does writing a post like this betray a latent conservatism in me? Am I at risk of running off and joining the New Formalists? Or maybe I'm a Language reader after all, unresolved about what it means to really hate voice.

2006-06-12T00:22:00.000-04:00

As I try to push my entries from a concern with postmodernism to a discussion about translation, I envision Jacques Derrida & Roland Barthes, circa mid-late nineteen seventies, at a small Parisian restaurant.

Looking over the menu, I imagine Barthes voicing, "Il n'y a pas de hors d'oeuvres."

2006-06-11T00:52:00.000-04:00

The ongoing discussion of postmodernism on the BuffPo list has got me thinking, again, about how little wherewithal I have to come at postmodernism in a meaningful & sophisticated way. The trouble, I think, is that while I did describe postmodernism as the re-discovery of the local, it's still a predominantly western philosophical trend, albeit at the moment that the west discovers the difference of the rest of the world. Still, without that background in the continental philosophical tradition--Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard seem to be commentaries on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel--I'm always already, as they say, playing catch-up with postmodernist theory.

On the other hand, what I do represents something of an exemplary postmodernist case. A twenty-first century American studying medieval Chinese poetry, to which he was introduced by translations of twentieth century American poets. For any westerner to study a non-western literature at all is, I think, either a colonialist act or a postmodernist act, and to throw these things together and question one's own colonialism is about as genuinely postmodernist as notoriously ungenuine postmodernism can get (I can think of only one sincerely modernist reader of Chinese literature, in the case of James J. Y. Liu, who for much of his career gave a strongly New Critical spin to his interactions with Chinese poetry). In studying pre-modern Chinese literature, I must confront the very questions of locality, universality, and subjectivity that define postmodernist reading practices.

And yet, exactly because I study Chinese literature as a non-native speaker, and am also always already playing catch-up, I hardly have the time, let alone the training, to gain anything beyond a dilettante's understanding of postmodernist thought. While on the one hand this represents a paragon of postmodernist identity play, as I stand for a condition I can never completely know, on the other hand it represents a way in which postmodernism responds to a world not yet fully achieved in becoming postmodern. That is, particularly in the academic world, power stuctures and dynamics of course-requirements still exist in many fully modernistic ways, and the demand for me to know postmodernism is indicative of western theory's dominance in the world even when the object of study is a non-western phenomenon. As I said, postmodernism is a specific branch of western theory that requires a grasp of pre-postmodern (how's that for a tightly-defined time-frame?) continental theory to understand; while its own culture-specific nature cannot be denied, the imposition of that locality onto the literature or history of another is an act against its own conclusions. A sincerely postmodernist reading of Chinese literature would not need to confront any questions raised by non-Asian theorists.

Or am I all wrong? I am describing a pre-modernist reading, rather than a postmodernist one. In my experience, postmodernism never seems to say, Oh, you don't need to worry about that. Rather, it keeps piling it on. And in the postmodern world, one of the factors we have to confront is the fact of international perspectives, and how someone like me could learn from Foucault how to read medieval Chinese poetry. Ideally, in a completely postmodern world, perhaps that would also mean that an English PhD would have to confront how reading Lu Ji contributed to a greater understanding of Jacques Roubaud. And while I'm not sure if that has happened yet, I think that it could.

2006-06-10T01:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I wrote a post about postmodernism & Marcus Bales. And I keep wondering why.

I explained that I postponed, and then gave up on, responding to an email from Marcus in a two-year old debate, but the very fact that I have devoted more of my brain- and typing-space to him means that obviously I haven't made good on my promise. What, as they say, is up with that?

Weblogs and mass email lists are a strange beast: at times they mimic the intimacy of private communication, but they can be read by any number of all sorts of people. They are published, which means they are public, but without the editorial obstacle course of the book world that presumes to ensure that if something doesn't warrant large-scale readership, not enough copies will be printed to grant it. And on a slightly more personal level, we all know that the further away the recipient gets from the sender, the less control the sender has over the tone & content of the message.

This is more personal because once on a quick reply to a post on Chinese poetry to the BuffPo list, I seriously angered someone I didn't really mean to offend; he said I "publicly called him out," and only after a handful of conciliatory back-channel emails (and maybe some triangulation with mutual friends) did I manage to appease him.

So in a blog, which is pretty obviously to me more public (at least in intent if not in execution) than an email subscription list such as BuffPo, what happens if Marcus Bales thinks I'm "calling him out," especially after I've already decided not to bother with engaging with him in debates? In addition to being less than true to myself, does this also mean that I'm publicly criticizing someone without giving him a fair chance to defend himself? Am I nothing more than a tyrant?

Then again, my writing is my own at least as much as it is anyone else's, and I would never advise anyone to hold back for fear of repurcussions (this is the flip side of that grandmotherly advice my eighth-grade science teacher told me: "never write anything you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of your newspaper"--but really, how much would I want to see my academic seminar papers on translation & medieval Chinese literature published on the front page of any newspaper? Talk about a slow news day!). Fear is a debilitating emotion, and I think it can only cripple the act of writing.

And so here I am, trying to mediate between these two poles. I have to balance my urge to ignore Marcus Bales so he'll go away against my sense that such an urge arises from a fear that in the end will limit, rather than expand, my writing. What I might call the postmodernist response, having it both ways, would be to address these very fears in a piece of writing.

Oh, blogs. On one cyber-page, I can sin and expiate my sins in the same gesture.

2006-06-08T22:39:00.000-04:00

I will name names: Marcus Bales doesn't know what he's talking about.

Recently the Buffalo Poetics List has been afire, as rarely in recent memory, over a discussion about the term "postmodernism." When I read the initial request--someone asking if anyone had any recommendations for, if I recall correctly, readings for an undergrad course introducing contemporary literary theory & practice--I thought the BuffPo group was a wonderful target to query. A ragtag gathering of intellectuals and academics, educated in but without being overly loyal to the shiboleths of the academy, all of whom have a vested interest in experimental--a. k. a. postmodernist--poetry ought to be the best place to search for honest, informed, and somewhat irreverent ideas about the theories behind postmodernism.

What a mistake that turned out to be. The first batch of responses turned out to be dismissive scoffs about the impenetrability of the term postmodern, followed by a brief discussion about whether some writers, directors, or bloggers are in fact postmodern. Still, none of the terms was well defined, so while the debate got heated, it seemed to me to be so many gears spinning without connecting to any other gears.

Finally, people started offering their opinions about what postmodernism might be, and how best to understand it. And that was when Marcus Bales walked in.

I suppose at this point I should mention that since I switched to reading the BuffPo mailings in digest form--which significantly curtailed my interest in posting anything of my own--I've paid special attention to the posts of Marcus Bales. That's because he & I had a significant debate two years ago about--actually, I don't remember what, but I think it was about academic labor in the larger context of American culture. The debate started as exchanges on the Buffalo Poetics list, but because at one point my emailer's "reply" button sent a message directly to Marcus instead of to the whole list, it ended up being a back-channel response. Email after email I found Marcus to be beligerent, bossy, obtuse, and wrong, but somehow he made points incisive enough for me to continue writing back (for his part, I'm sure he thought me idealistic, naive, immature, defensive, and wrong, too). Eventually I lost steam, and for two years I had saved his last response, paying attention to his BuffPo noises, intending to get back to the conversation eventually.

Until I read his response (here) to someone's remarks about her own family. When she demonstrated that she wasn't a man-hater by offering her family's laughter at the concept, Marcus wrote back with a six-point attack on her defense. Granted, relying on your own anecdotes from your family to prove that you are or are not something is not particularly convincing, but I couldn't figure out why Marcus would be so vindictive and angry to bother with such a scathing reply. It fit in all too well with what I remembered from my exchange with Marcus a year and a half earlier: while at times he may have been accurate in his criticisms, those criticisms never seemed to be aimed at furthering understanding, but rather at insulting for the sake of insulting. I deleted the message I had been waiting to reply to, and gave up any intention of engaging with him again.

And so with all this in my head, I found myself reading what Marcus has to say about postmodernism. Again, Marcus comes off as insulting and mean for its own sake, aimed only at tearing down other people for their attempts at understanding rather than ever offering anything of his own. I find it a shame that so many of the attempts to define postmodernism were so hesitant or inaccurate, because rather than reading Lyotard, Derrida, Jameson, or even the impressively comprehensive Postmodernism for Beginners, and actively wrestling with their expert and challenging theories, Marcus latched on to the amateur attempts of listmembers and began to suck blood.

His embittered responses are many, but in one recent post, he said this of postmodernism:

I think it is an embarrassing mistake; that the people who initially started writing about it didn't think it through, and by that time they were too well-known for writing about "postmodernism" to back down, and they were stuck with this pointless pseudo-movement about which so many of its defenders and advocates are either inarticulate, incoherent, or both.

I'm unclear what Marcus would have to be so embarrassed about. If he doesn't like postmodernism, let him not like postmodernism. I'm sure we have enough room in the world for people to like it, dislike it, believe it, oppose it, and even not think it exists. But Marcus's embarrassment seems to come from an understanding that postmodernism is irrationalist and necessitates a specific break in the human condition. I guess this is a good example of what Marcus has to say about postmodernism, in reply to someone else's explanation:

> Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of
> all universal or 'totalizing' discourses (to use a favored phrase) are
> the hallmarks of postmodernist thought.<
What crap. Those are the hallmarks of rational thought, not postmodern irrationalist thought. You think it was a postmodern who thought up "Question Authority"? Was Socrates, then, postmodern?

While I suppose postmodernism could incorporate both irrationalism and a specific break in the human condition, I don't see either as completely definitive of this particularly nebulous theory. Rather, postmodernism to me is the rebirth of the local: on an artistic level, this means that each locality's artistic expression requires a different set of standards and judgments. Same for politics or philosophy: what works for me doesn't necessarily work for you. This is distinct from modernism, in which theories such as colonialism or Marxism or New Criticism would impose their standards upon all different kinds of realities, regardless of whether local differences might require a different look. For me, this is what Lyotard's claim that postmodernism is incredulity toward metanarratives means. As a translator, I'm especially interested in how literary quality is measured--and mediated--as writing from two cultures come together. But that's a different story.

What interests me about Marcus's response, even as I say he doesn't know what he's talking about, is that his reaction strikes me as nothing but postmodernist: first, his misunderstanding of postmodernism challenges the postmodernist in us to accept that his locality views postmodernism as he does. After all, postmodernism constitutes a split from positivism and the possibility of certainty; at some extent, all understanding is essentially a misunderstanding, and each misunderstanding is just a certain kind of understanding. Marcus's (mis)understanding is just that: a locally defined approach to postmodernism. Second, his reaction is born out of his own incredulity toward the metanarrative of postmodernism. Postmodernism as a cultural force may indeed have gotten too strong, ceased being a critique, and instead, has turned itself into the cultural dominant that must be doubted, if not overthrown (though I don't mean to bring up other doubts about Hegelian dialectics). If so, Marcus Bales is the one to tell us.

Though I still insist that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

2006-06-08T00:19:00.000-04:00

Republicans have spun a phrase about the East-coast liberal elite, hiding the fact that the Republicans are the party of the elitists. And so much of what I've come to devote my life to, poetry and academics, gets treated as elitist, as insular, and I have to reconcile that perception with my own wish for democracy and solidarity.

The question is whether "The Ivory Tower" was created by those who inhabit it or those who do not; are poets insular, or are we isolated?

Yesterday I was speaking with two friends, one a fiction writer, and the other a publisher who's attained a certain amount of success with literary fiction and who has long since abandoned poetry, both as unsaleable and as beyond his interests. I said that I don't need to read Billy Collins--I can criticize and dismiss his writing without reading it--and he wanted to know why; as a publicist who doesn't read poetry, Collins was one of the only poets he'd heard of. And his impression was that he was writing an accessible poetry, while so many other poets are writing to each other as an insular group.

And a week ago I read on Ron Silliman's blog a similar comment about academics. He described

Project Muse, a service whose sole function is to keep critical writing out of the hands of independent scholars and general readers, so as to maintain the two-tier (or more) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured & tenured-to-be (they hope).

For a long time I resisted the Language Poets, but in the past year or so I've been reading Silliman's blog & have in the past few days come upon Charles Bernstein's essays. I'm still not convinced by their poetry, but in a large way this only means that I haven't learned how to read their writing. What most appeals to me, though, is how Silliman, with his School of Quietude, and Bernstein, with his Official Verse Culture, have thought through the questions of canonization and the mainstream and recognition and so on. Reading their prose has contributed to pushing me beyond my erstwhile aestheticist predilections towards a contextualized, dare I say postmodernist understanding of poetry and power (and all this while in coursework on a PhD in Chinese literature). Essentially, a system exists that keeps a certain kind of poetry mainstream, silently excluding the non-mainstream from its hallowed halls.

So when my publisher friend thinks that Collins writes an accessible poetry, that so-called accessibility is based on the possibilities people's education will afford them; just as I said I haven't learned how to read Language poetry, most people have learned how to read the kind of poetry Collins writes. And yet, just for those reasons, I'm uninterested. I'm not challenged. But the important factor is that the accessibility has little to do with the poetry itself, and more to do with the extraneous factors that provide anyone with the education to read any given kind of poetry. Or, as Bernstein explained in "The Academy in Peril," now printed in Content's Dream:

Let me be specific as to what I mean by "official verse culture"--I am referring to the poetry publishing and reviewing practices of The New York Times, The Nation, American Poetry Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), Antaeus, Parnassus, Atheneum Press, all the major trade publishers, the poetry series of almost all of the major university presses (the University of California Press being a significant exception at present). Add to this the ideologically motivated selection of the vast majority of poets teaching in university writing and literature programs and of poets taught in such programs as well as the interlocking accreditation of these selections through prizes and awards judged by these same individuals. Finally, there are the self-appointed keepers of the gate who actively put forward biased, narrowly focused and frequently shrill and contentious accounts of American poetry, while claiming, like all disinformation propaganda, to be giving historical or nonpartisan views.

The poetry barely enters into it. Rather, the mechanism by which we come to learn how to read poetry is rigged. It takes work to learn how to read Silliman and Bernstein (work, by the way, I continue to put off; at any rate, my more immediate reading work will take me to Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Rachel Blau Du Plessis). And so when I explained to my friend that yes, obscurantist, elitist, and insular poets exist, just as ivory-tower academics exist, the problem is that without a hard-fought education in poetry, we cannot know who is obscurantist from who is challenging, who is elitist from who is exacting, and who is insular from who is engaged in the questions of how language participates in the social, economic, political, and emotional relationships we live in.

So when I read Silliman in an aside about Project Muse, and how it maintains an insularity amongst academics, something reverberates. While I've noticed that the Language poets and their readers are a bit anxious about the academy (if I'm not mistaken, Silliman went to but did not graduate from college, and Bernstein is a professor with no PhD but a BA from Harvard... and of course the Language poets are not just these two), I am touched by how Silliman doesn't blame the "tenured & tenured-to-be" for speaking only to themselves. Certainly many academics are not trying to engage with independent scholars or general readers, but amidst the economic protectionism of Project Muse and JSTOR, plus the exorbitant prices of scholarly monographs as universities set their presses into the "free" market, most of us face nearly insurmountable odds even if we do want to speak to others outside the ivory tower--even if we want to liberate academia from the ivory tower at all. And as for those outside the university structure, without an ID to get into an academic library, accessing the education with which to discern the magnanimous from the obnoxious is a challenge, as well.

Despite Project Muse's subscription rate, the internet can help. I know some academics who blog, and for now that remains a free service. One day it may go the way of pirated music downloads, but I should link Print Culture to this page.

When I hinted above that the kind of poetry I am most interested in is poetry engaged in the questions of how language participates in the social, economic, political, and emotional relationships we live in, I should add that this is the kind of academic work I respond to most. Though I should perhaps exchange the word "language" for "literature." And when I wrote, the day I accidentally signed up for a blog, that I would be writing about translation, labor, literature, academic culture, those are the questions I meant to be working out.

2006-06-07T01:44:00.000-04:00

I will be strict with myself: I should write every day. Yesterday a book review; today, I'm finally putting something else on my weblog.

I seem to require a routine. For six years I wrote something, some seed or germ of a few lines that I hoped might sprout or fester into a poem, but when I came to graduate school, I stopped. My seeds were too boring, too similar to each other and the certain successful poems I'd not progressed beyond in college to sprout into any truly great or provocative poetry. The plan at first was to rest for a month and then pick up the habit again, but the month sprouted into a year and the year turned into three. And now that I finally feel like I have something to say, poetically, I may have forgotten how to write a poem.

Am I naive to think I may push through to a new kind of discovery? The only way to be sure that I'll write anything worth reading is to make sure I'm writing. But with the routine must come a variation, or else I'm bound to be writing boring seeds before too long. But if I change the medium, periodically, writing reviews, essays, translations, blog entries, and poems, but something each day, then--so the story goes--I might reach a place where the different styles bounce off and propel each other into further territories of revelation.

That is the plan, anyhow. The point is not just to write poems, but to write. The act of putting thought & feeling into words has some use to it, regardless of what generic shape those words take. Though I will note that for the sake of my routine, I hope not to write all my blog entries at two in the morning as Shenxin is waiting for me to get to bed.

2006-01-26T22:20:00.000-05:00

Do I actually have a blog? It came upon me accidentally: I wanted to comment on another blogger's post, but the price of admission for posting a comment is being a blogger yourself. And so here I am; comment commented, and no plan on what to say next.

Things to look for: translation, labor, literature, academic culture.